Ruta Sepetys’ “Between Shades of Gray” has the peculiar coincidence of a title that’s going to be easily confused with “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the mommy-porn novel about a malleable young girl initiated by an older man who seduces her into an S&M relationship. (And if you don’t know what S&M is, then you’re the reader that “Between Shades of Gray” is meant for.)

Septys’ story takes place in Lithuana, 1941. Linda, 15, is looking forward to art school when Soviet secret police arrest her father, and then Lina, her mother and her little brother, and banish them to Siberia. Before they’re hauled away to the north, Lina’s friend Andrius makes she she finds a copy of a book that he’s peppered with messages. In the dreary, austere prison camp, where Lina and the others live in unheated huts and rely for food from capricious, malicious guards, her focus turns from art to survival.

It’s a moving account of an aspect of World War II that’s overshadowed by more famous events in Germany, Poland and other countries. How cruel humans can be to one another. And yet somehow hope survives.